yep, that is because of cloud. i hate it, with a passion. and am never going to touch it ever again. BUT you also have to keep in mind that when you were a junior, there were no large websites like facebook or youtube and whatnot, like there are today. and these beasts simply have way different requirements. and it is not only about being the top dog. but even a corporate website of a larger company these days simply needs computational power/infrastructure to serve the whole world these days. so it's not like there is a single thing we can blame here. the dev and ops have been merged and there is no longer a distinction. you have to write code with distributed computation, db,... in mind these days. which means you need to think about all those things that are outside of the business domain.